In Maryland. . . .

. . .it's 9:05 am and the boy is still sleeping.  The older one is happily capturing Pokemon with her Nintendo DS, and I'm watching CBS Sunday Morning with my mother.

Yesterday we made our semi-annual pilgrimage to the National Lutheran Home for its Spring Festival.  It's lost much of the 'wow' factor that it had when I was a child; the event was formerly held on a Friday and my mother would parole me from school for the afternoon.

When we started going back to the Spring and Fall Festivals, there were still members of St. Peter's, the church I grew up in, living at the home.  Most have since died, and those that volunteered have gotten older and given over their responsibilities to others.  Not to mention that back in the 1980s, while we were living in Illinois, the Home moved from 18th and Douglas Streets in Northeast DC out to Rockville, Maryland.  Not much of the old, familiar other than the photographs of the original Home on one of the walls.

Now we got to see friends from Lewisdale who living in the Independent Living homes surrounding the Home, we go in memory of my grandmother who used to volunteer for years in the Stamp Room.  She would bring home bags filled with the corners of envelopes in them, soak the stamps off, put them between those sheets of newspapers to dry which she put under the pads on her dining room table to keep them flat.  It was a great way for a kid (me) to start a stamp collection.

Now the tradition is that Thea is given a budget of $5 (and Micah got $2) to spend as she likes.  Yesterday, she bought a sunflower pin for me ($0.25), because she said as she presented it to me "you are always buying things and doing things for us", she spent another $0.25 on an X-Men hand-held video game, and $2 on a used Othello game (ages 8+, she's been playing it since kindergarten).  Then as we were at the Ladies' Auxillary's table, petting Roxie one of the volunteer's dog,  Thea opened her purse and took out a dollar and made a donation to the Auxillary.  The volunteer wrote out a receipt for Thea because she was impressed.  Thea was impressed with the receipt and over the fuss that was made over her.

Meanwhile, Micah practiced deficit spending by finding one of our friend Eleanor's doll blankets with a puppy wrapped in it, so he handed over his $2, helped by another $10 from me.  ("But I L-O-V-E him, Mommy" and since he was being good at keeping his hands off to himself, how could I resist when its for a good cause?)  He scammed another Beanie Baby dog (in a hideous shade of aqua) from his Oma in the Grandma's Attic section.

Then after lunch at the Home comes the best part of the afternoon, we go to the Eleanor's and I buy quilts. This time I needed enough doll quilts for Micah's class, because next week is Q-week at his school and two nap quilts for gifts.  At school it is Q is for Quail week starting on Monday.  These children stand as much chance of seeing a real quail as I do of waking up skinny tomorrow morning, so to exert my influence that Q is for QUILT, dammit.  Screw the quails.

On the way home from Rockville, Micah fell asleep as we got on the Beltway, which revved him up enough so that we unloaded the car, switched from sandals to sneakers and went to Oma's Special Park (which is the kids' name for Laurel Springs Park in LaPlata).  I love that they are now at an age when I can say "go, run, just check in every now and then" and then I park myself on a bench to thumb through the Post's Sunday Magazine section.

They ran like maniacs for almost an hour, making friends with various children and drawing them into their games.  And after turning themselves into sweaty, panting messes, they were more than happy to go back to Oma's.

We had take-out from Hunan Star III.  Micah came with me to pick up the order.  Micah was his usually charming self, so the lady at the counter gave him a flower fan, the kind used to decorate drinks.  The best part was that one of the ladies working at the restaurant who is talking to Micah, says to me, "He is Chinese?"

Do you think?  Really?

But I politely said, "Yes."  Rather than try to pronounce Jinzhou, I said we traveled to Wuhan.  And then the woman said, "Yes, I knew he is Chinese."  Genius!  She is the Queen of the Amateur Anthropologists!  The whole world can look at Micah within about a nanosecond or so know that at sometime in this child's past there were family members who came from China.

Thea was so tired, she started falling asleep while waiting for Micah to finish his bath, so I gave her a pass on showering until Sunday morning.